


Just The Sun In Your Eyes

by prosciutto



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 04:10:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5115302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosciutto/pseuds/prosciutto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out, ghosts do a lot of wandering. There isn’t much to do <i>other</i> than wander.</p><p>“We could start haunting people.” Bellamy points out, hopeful. “Find a abandoned property, settle down and become small-town ghosts. It’s a pretty cushy gig.”</p><p>She vetoes the idea. He sulks about it for over a week.</p><p>Or: Clarke Griffin didn't think dying would involve one Bellamy Blake. She's not pleased by this development.</p><p>
  <b> Winner of the Bellarke Fanfiction Awards Best Angst One-Shot! </b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just The Sun In Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> [blakesdoitbetter](http://blakesdoitbetter.tumblr.com/) sent in this prompt: bellarke are ghosts together after dying in the same accident (plane crash maybe?) they didn't know each other in life but they have to make peace before they can move on..CUE THE LOVE STORY!! HAVE FUN!!! And I promptly went overboard and wrote this 4k piece. Ha. Clearly I have my priorities straight.

The trick to compartmentalisation, she realises, is pulling back first.

It’s what keep her hands steady when she makes the first cut, lights hot against the back of her neck and hair damp under her surgical cap. It’s what straightens her spine, pulls her head high when she loosens the dirt from between her fingers, remnants of it still caught between her nails when they finally seal the coffin.

(He would have hated it. But this was what her mother wanted, and the only thing she could give.)

So when the engine fails, the absence of machine hum louder than anything-  _they were right_ , she thinks,  _planes are just steel boxes suspended in the sky_ \- she unbuckles her seatbelt, pulls her knees up to her chin and turns to face the window.

She has to scramble for a memory, something good. Wells was nine and she was eight- their rhyming phase, their poems phase- and he had tugged on her pigtails, gentle and teasing,  _bold and gold,_  he told her-

“Maybe we’ll land on water,” Someone says, words thick and garbled as the plane trembles before them, the seat shaking violently beneath her and rattling teeth-

They hit the ground instead. (It’s a lot more painful than she thought it would be.)

__________________________

Clarke never really thought about the afterlife per say, but she’s pretty sure it doesn’t constitute a angry-looking guy hovering over her and  _scowling._

She blinks, dislodging a fine layer of ash and grime coating her lashes. They fall against her face in flakes, burns against her throat as she begins to hack at the smell.

Maybe she’s not dead, after all. She’s pretty sure being dead should hurt a lot less.

“Get up,” he rasps, arms tightening reflexively by his sides- as if he was holding back from offering a hand to help her up- “we need to get going.”

“Get going  _where_?” she snaps, struggling to her feet, “To get help?”

His answering smile is grim, more of a grimace than anything.

“Not exactly,” he says flatly, trudging ahead of her and giving her a prime view of dark, messy hair, crusted with blood and filth. There’s blood streaked along his temples too, coating the collar of his jacket and the cuffs of his sleeves.

She doesn’t  _want_  to follow him, but her feet trail after him uselessly, pulling her along. The smell of smoke hangs thickly in the air, burning foul and acrid. Her stomach turns at it, suddenly plagued by images of charred flesh and skin peeling off bone.

“Stop,” she croaks, and when he ignores her, she clears her throat and puts a little more force into it.

“I said,  _stop._ ”

“What?” he snaps, spinning on his foot to face her, his shoulders tight with anger.

“If we’re looking to get help, we need to go back to the wreckage. There can be something we can salvage there. I’m a doctor, I can help you with that wound-”

“It’s a little too late for that,” he says between clenched teeth, the muscle by his mouth fluttering rapidly. There’s blood on his chin too, and she spies the clean white of bone against his jaw.

Clarke swallows, wonders if the sharp inhale she takes is instinctual rather than necessary.

“It’s not infected yet,” she tries.

“We’re not the survivors,” he says, quiet. Then after a beat, he adds, “There were no survivors.”

He takes her to her body. (It’s worse than she thought it would be.)

“At least you’re mostly intact,” he says, matter-of-fact.

She gives a shaky laugh- and because she doesn’t trust her legs to hold her up anymore- sinks into a crouch. Her eyes are open, blood matted into her hair. The face of her father’s watch is cracked, and if she strains her ears she can still hear it ticking away hollowly. She grazes the band with her new fingers, the metal cool against her skin.

And because there’s nothing else left to say, she adds, “You’re handling this well.”

He snorts- it could be a warm sound, she thinks, fond, almost, if it didn’t have a hollow quality to it- “I had a twenty minutes headstart.”

She lets herself fall back against the ground, butt-first so she can fit her knees against her chest with ease.

“Why didn’t you just go?”

He shrugs, settling down next to her. “I couldn’t. Not physically, at least. I couldn’t get too far away from you without,” He rubs a palm over his face, considering, and she remembers the way she had followed him mechanically before, even when she didn’t want to. The force she had to exert to stay put.  

“A tether,” she murmurs, turning her face away from her body, the wreckage. The sky is darkening overhead, the faint smell of rain permeating her senses as she watches the flames crackle in the distance.  _Good,_  she thinks, distant. She’ll feel better once the fires are put out.

They lapse back into silence, staring back down at her body as if waiting for its chest to rise, for it to act. But nothing happens, and it’s jarring how quickly she started looking at her body at something else entirely, a separate entity.

“Bellamy,” he says, abrupt, “that, uh. Was my name.”

Bellamy keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon, refusing to look at her. He could be handsome, she thinks, under all the blood and shards of bone stark against the sun. Raven would have liked him, tall and dark and broody, exactly her type. (It starts to hurt, thinking about Raven. She pushes the thought away.)

“Clarke,” she says finally, dipping her chin against the inside of her elbow so she can look at him properly, “what now?”

He closes his eyes, sighs long and deep before flopping down to the ground, arms stiff by his sides.

“Can we figure it out later?” he asks, defeated.

She hums her approval, dropping down next to him, a safe distance away. Far enough so their elbows don’t graze, but close enough for her to notice the smattering of freckles by his nose, most of it obscured under dried blood.

Clarke turns her face up to the sky, closes her eyes when she feels the first drop of rain against her skin.

__________________________

It turns out, ghosts do a lot of wandering. There isn’t much to do  _other_  than wander.

“We could start haunting people.” Bellamy points out, hopeful. “Find a abandoned property, settle down and become small-town ghosts. It’s a pretty cushy gig.”

She vetoes the idea. He sulks about it for over a week.

They take turns visiting places they have never been to; cobblestone streets and crumbling buildings one day, bareboned trees and empty spaces on the others. They go to places where their breaths are visible huffs of air and icicles hang in sheets. (It’s not necessary, breathing, that is. They still do it anyway. It’s habitual, at this point.)

“Where were you from?” she asks him one day, his face tilted up and towards the weak rays of sunlight.

“Nevada,” he mutters, impatiently pushing his hair out of his face. “what about you?”

Clarke leans back against the tree, copies him and angles her face up against the sun. “Arizona.”

Bellamy swallows, throat bobbing. His voice is hoarse when he speaks, forced and ripped from teeth.

“I always hated how warm it got. How my shirt would stick to my back, and my how my hair used to go all over the place. I don’t miss the humidity.”

She lifts an eye open lazily, runs her gaze over his messy, overgrown hair, curling slightly by the nape of his neck.

“It’s still all over the place despite the weather.”

He scowls, his shoulder brushing against hers lightly when he shifts, “Shut up.”

She straightens, lines her elbow up against his so they touch, barely. “Did you ever have it short?”

He chuckles, runs his fingers through his hair at that. “Yeah, I had it cropped short for a while. My sister.” He pauses, weighing his words, “She hated it. She begged me to let it grow out.”

He was different when he talked about her. Softer, affectionate. Blunt edges where his words had once been sharp. She liked this side to him, too. It was rare- they hardly ever talked about before, only after- but she liked it when it reared its head.

“Where to next?” she asks.

It’s out of politeness, more than anything else. Clarke already knows. They’ll go further into winter, where the wind wouldn’t sting against their faces and where the fabric of her tank top didn’t felt thin against her skin. They would go further into unknown places, strange ones, where there was nothing familiar or easy. They would go somewhere they could still pretend.

“How do you feel about Alaska?” He grins.

__________________________

“Octavia,” he tells her one day, solemn.

Clarke makes another notch against her boot, the rock sharp and digging into her palms. The lines are evenly spaced but crooked, the same problem she used to encounter when carving pumpkins. Wells had been a lot better at it. (Wells had been better at a lot more things.)

“Clarke.” she reminds him, dropping the rock back to the ground. “Or are we trying something new now? Is this supposed to be role-play?”

Bellamy makes an impatient noise, fingers still canvassing the ground for a rock of his choosing.

“That was her name. My sister, that is.” he pauses, still pointedly not looking at her until she hands him a smooth, even rock. His fingers are still warm against hers when they brush.

“I couldn’t remember.” he continues, encouraged by her silence, “She had this way of smiling. I woke up today and I couldn’t remember the shape of it.”

“It’s been ninety days.” she says, “What did you expect?”

“I’ve known her for twenty five years.” Bellamy snaps, pushing off from the ground and staggering slightly, “She’s my _sister._ ”

Clarke opens her mouth, braces herself to say the unthinkable,  _maybe it’s time to look for them, maybe-_

“Time to go,” she mutters instead. And because he’s never looked at her like this before- wounded and impatient and  _hurt_ \- she lets herself take his wrist; two fingers against skin and the other three against his jacket.

She limits her touches now, saves them up for rainy days. She indulges on the bad days, pressing her forearm against his, brushing up against his side. Stands a little closer on the mediocre ones, sometimes allowing herself to graze his fingers.

(There haven’t been enough good days for her to consider what to do then.)

It’s a quiet Tuesday night, dark too, so no one notices when they take a sketchbook and some pencils. Bellamy used to flinch every time someone would go right through him, inhaling sharply as if he could fold in on himself and disappear entirely. Now he remains mostly stone faced.

“Describe her,” Clarke says once they’ve settled down, sketchbook laying against her thighs and shoes pressed into the snow.

(“We don’t leave footprints anymore,” Bellamy had observed in the first few days, smiling crookedly. She had shrugged, forced down the twisting of her gut.)

“I don’t know,” he says, suddenly shy, “Her face is pretty long, I guess.”

She starts a basic outline for it, paying careful mind to the bone structure, drawing it like how she imagined Bellamy’s would be under all the blood.

“Not like that.” he interrupts, “Rounder.”

“You said it was  _long_.”

“Not that long,” Bellamy groans, his nails scratching against the top of her thighs when he pulls the sketchbook from her lap. She trembles in response, rests her hands against her calves to steady herself.

“It’s fuller, I think.”

“That’s a heart-shaped face, Bellamy.”

He flushes, shoves the book back onto her lap before crossing his arms over his chest.

“It’s not like I studied art or anything. How was I supposed to know?”

Clarke snorts, repositioning the book before going at it with an eraser, “Knowing basic face shapes doesn’t qualify you for an art degree.”

“Was that what you majored in?” he asks, his eyes still fixed on the movement of her pencil, “Art?”

“Amongst other things,” she quips, sneaking a quick peek over at him before returning to her drawing, “I was pre-med actually, but I dropped it after a year and did art history instead. What about you?”

“Classical studies.” he says, after a beat. “I was a teacher.”

“Figures.” She laughs, and at his bewildered expression, adds, “You’re bossy.”

He rolls his eyes at that, shifting so their shoulders touch. She sucks in her breath at first, counts to ten, but he doesn’t move away and neither does she.

“What about her ears?” she asks instead, and it’s a considerable effort to keep her voice level.

“They stick out,” Bellamy adds, dry, and keeps going until she relaxes against her side.

(It’s only been a mediocre day, but she lets herself have this.)

__________________________

It’s Clarke’s turn to pick, and so they go to Arizona.

“Are you sure?” he asks, apprehensive as a flip-flop clad tourist walks right through him. Bellamy bats him away impatiently, falls into step next to her, “We can always leave, if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.” she says, firm. She knows Bellamy well enough now to know that he would respect her decisions, that he wouldn’t put up a fight when she told him she wanted to see her mother.

What she doesn’t expect is for him to take her hand.

His palm is huge enough that it swallows hers, blood still caked under nails and streaked with grease. She can smell him now that they’re close enough, like motor oil and salt, or maybe sweat.

“Lead the way,” he says pointedly when she doesn’t react.

Everything smells like antiseptic- the walls stark under the bright lights- and she finds herself lingering instead of looking, pointing out the places she loved as a child. The vending machines by the third floor, the creaky set of chairs by the eighth.

“This the only place that sells the gummies shaped like pizza,” she tells him, and he takes two for her once they’ve ensured that no one was around.

“It wouldn’t matter, you know.” Bellamy had added, a tad too innocently, “Hospitals are prime places for haunting. No one would be suspicious, or anything.”

“You’re an idiot,” she grumbles under her breath, and he grins, squeezing her palm in response.

They find her mother at her desk.

She still has the same picture of Clarke on her desk- three years old, paint smeared all over her face- Jake a blur in the background, a flash of teeth and blonde hair.

She’s not surprised that her mother had aged, but it’s still a shock to the system nonetheless. She finds herself staring, reaching out to pull at greying strands only for her hand to pass right through her.

“She looks tired,” Bellamy says, observational, and she shoots him a scathing look in return.

“Probably exhausted from having to deal with my funeral alone,” she snarks, coming round to rest her hands against the back of her mother’s chair instead.

And because she can’t look at her face without wanting to cry, she says it to the back of her mother’s head instead.

“I’m sorry.”

Then, to Bellamy, “I wasn’t meant to outlive her. Neither was my father, I think.”

He doesn’t say anything, just comes up next, resting his chin against her bowed head. Her mother still smells the same, of vanilla soap and the knockoff Victoria’s Secret perfume Clarke had bought her when she was eight.

 _Creature of habit_ , she thinks, wry, before pulling away. Some things don’t change.

She startles at the pointed knock of the door, the sight of Marcus Kane with his hand resting against the door knob.

“Ready to go?” he asks, his question directed at her mother, fond and familiar and-

She blinks, backs up a few steps. Her mother _hated_ Marcus. At least, that’s what she’d told Clarke over their dinners, mostly complaining about how rigid and backwards he was about the way the hospital was run. She had started to tune all of it out when her mother started getting repetitive about it.

He loops an arm around her, pulling her close, both of them conversing in low murmurs before shutting the door behind them with a quiet click.

“It’s nice, that she has someone.” Bellamy says, soft. She laces their fingers back together.

“It’s great,” she agrees, and it’s true, even though it’s hard to talk with the lump in her throat and the tears that well up in her eyes. “I’m happy for her.”

“Do you want to stay a little longer?”

“No,” she manages, wiping at her eyes with the back of his palm, “I think I got what I needed. Your pick?”

“I was thinking Nevada,” he says, his voice catching.

“Okay,” She tells him, burying her head against his chest, her breathing ragged against his shirt before they go.

__________________________

Octavia Blake looks nothing and everything like her brother.

Nothing, because Clarke has only seen her brother lank and dirty, whereas she is clean and radiant. Nothing, because the curve of his jaw is bone, hollow and stark, while hers is hidden under a layer of skin.

Everything, in the way she moves, the way she speaks. With her hands, and in a constant, rising pitch. In the pointed looks she shoots her husband, Lincoln. The stubborn tilt of the chin and the furrowed brow.

“They got married.” Bellamy says, still pressed up against the walls, as if afraid to take even a single step towards her. “They were only engaged when I left.”

“Did you know him well?”

He laughs, tightening his grip on her hand. “I liked him well enough. Though I didn’t make it easy for them, not at first.”

“I’m not surprised,” she announces, and it gets him to relax, his posture sagging as he leans against the wall instead.

Lincoln gives his wife a smacking kiss on the cheek, placating her as she hands over his car keys. Clarke doesn’t miss the way he gently palms at the swell of her stomach, the tender kiss he drops on her shoulder.

“She’s going to be okay.” Bellamy says, quiet, dropping his head against her shoulder, his voice muffled against her skin. “She has him to look out for her now, right?”

And because she doesn’t trust herself to speak- not in that moment, at least- Clarke just nods, her chin jostling against the bridge of his nose as he chokes on a small cry under the hollow of her ear.

“She was all I had, for a while.” he admits as she rests her palm against the back of his neck, rubs soothing circles against it. “My sister, my responsibility.”

“You’ll always worry,” she murmurs when he pulls away, eyes wet, “I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.”

He huffs, a small exasperated smile playing against his lips. “Nah. Definitely not.”

They watch her for a little while longer, making breakfast and reading the paper, flipping through TV channels. Bellamy drops a kiss to her forehead- not actually making contact, several inches between, as if he could trick himself into thinking he could still do it- when she puts on her coat, reaches for her keys.

“Be safe, O.” he says, voice breaking, and then the door closes behind her.

__________________________

They could have left, but Bellamy brings her to his apartment instead.

He didn’t make the sheets before he left, his closet still hanging upon with a few shirts tangled up on the floor. “I was in a rush,” He says, defensive, spots of color appearing on his cheeks.

He clears the books off his bed for her, pulls her to his chest when she perches on the end of it. She burrows her face against the juncture between neck and shoulder, wipes off the flakes of dry blood that have rubbed off on her skin.

“Thank you,” he says against her hair, stirring it lightly with his breath.

“You too,” she manages, and before she can lose her nerve, sweeps a kiss against his ear lobe.

He stills, the only movement being the heaving of his chest when she raises herself up on her arms to look at him. His hands shake when he reaches up to push a tangled lock of hair behind her ear, ratty and impossibly knotted with blood.

“I would have asked you out,” Bellamy adds, swallowing hard, his throat bobbing, “If I were alive, I would have.”

She laughs, a breathless sound when he sits up, her legs tangled with his and seated on his lap. Impossibly close, close enough to count the lashes fanning against his skin.

“Honestly, I would have said no based on first impression alone.” she teases, “You were grumpy and standoffish.”

He slants his lips over her neck, over where her pulse should have been, kissing lightly as she shudders against him.

“And now?”

She slides her arms over his shoulders, holding him in place. He still has his jacket on, damp with blood and streaked with oil. Clarke trails a finger down the length of his jaw, stopping to kiss the point where bone melds with skin.

“You know the answer to that already.” she says, and finally, finally he kisses her, sweeping his tongue into her mouth and pushing her back down onto the bed.

“Being dead sucks,” he whines against her shoulder, biting at it when she squirms under him, “I’m dying to tell my friends that I still have game, you know, even after dying. It’s awesome.”

“You have friends?” Clarke adds, bemused, yelping in surprise when he tickles her sides.

“A friend,” Bellamy corrects, grinning wide. It used to scare her when he smiled like that, reminded her of what they were. Now it just makes her smile back, twining her fingers in his hair.

“Stop distracting me,” he grumbles when she kisses his collarbone, bites at the space behind his ear, “I’m trying to take your pants off.”

She snorts, assists him in kicking her pants off her legs and up into his face. He growls in annoyance before tossing it behind him, settling into the cradle of her hips.

“I used to be really, really good at this,” he tells her, his smile wolfish as he presses a kiss against her navel.

“Get to it then,” She laughs, tapping at his ass with her foot until he relents, hooking his fingers in her underwear.

“Aye, aye captain.” he says, gravelly and low, and she lets her head thump back against the pillow as he gets to work.

__________________________

The first thing she registers upon waking up is how hot and sticky she feels.

“Get off,” she mumbles, pushing at Bellamy’s arm banded over her torso. The sheets cling to her skin as she spits her hair out of her mouth, gagging.

He groans, chest rumbling as she swats at him until he lets go, turning over to the cooler side of the bed. She shoots his back a glare, pinching his bicep and digging her nails in. His only response is a snort.

“Suit yourself,” Clarke sighs, projecting her voice, “I was going to suggest hitting the shower together.”

He jerks up at that, freeing his feet from the tangled sheets as she grins at him, the light from the window falling against his skin-

Clean, she realises belatedly, confused. No blood or burns, nothing from what she saw last night. She pulls her gaze up to his face, her own confusion reflected in his eyes. No bone, or flecks of blood mixed in his hair. His full face, the light dusting of freckles she never got to look at properly.

Bellamy smiles, a crooked one, his hands reaching up to play with the ends of her hair.

“I like it a lot better when there’s no blood in it,” he says, right as she lunges at him, burying her face against his neck and breathing him in, sharp and sweet, nothing like motor oil or ash.

“What do you think happened?” she asks, stopping to press kisses against his neck, to mouth at his intact jaw.

“I think,” he hesitates, cupping the back of her neck with his palm, “we won’t be able to visit your mom or my sister any longer.”

The thought of it burns at her throat, makes tears spring to her eyes. She’s not sure if it’s from relief or sadness, at this point.

“Okay,” she manages, “What now?”

She feels him shrug, releasing a contented sigh when she presses her fingertips against his shoulders.

“We’ll figure it out,” he says instead, “We always do.”

Clarke closes her eyes, dips her head down to where his pulse should be, where she should be able to hear his heart pounding a jagged rhythm against bone.

(Nothing. But he’s warm, and she thinks that must count for something.)

“I believe you,” she tells him, before pushing him back down so they can go back to bed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for participating in my halloween bash guys! Until next year xx


End file.
